COIN app for iPhone/Android enables you to sell your phone's geolocation data in exchange for an in-app currency called COINs. You can spend those coins on a number of things from cryptocurrency to the latest Playstation. The cryptocurrency you can then hold onto (in anticipation of it becoming more valuable in the future), spend, or sell/exchange for your local currency. The process of obtaining coins is called “geomining”.

You can mine by driving, taking the train, taking your dog for a walk, being on your bike, or anything that gets you moving! Basically, this app rewards you for activity you already do. Besides, Google already takes your data for free, shouldn't you at least be getting paid for it?

If you would like 1,000 free COIN and haven't yet downloaded the COIN app, use this link to sign up. It gets you 1,000 free COIN automatically, doesn't cost you any money, and helps fund the development of this site.

When you first install the app, you must manually mine by clicking the pickaxe button. After about 15 mines, you unlock “auto-mine” which does it for you. The game splits the world up into tiles about 38 meters square, each of which you can mine once every so often.

Nothing here should be construed as financial advice. I do my best to keep this wiki updated, but sometimes I get things wrong, always refer to the confusing but official Coin app documentation and terms of service when in doubt.

Questions? Additions? Love notes? Email me at help {at} coinappwiki.com

How much you make varies based on your location, how many other players are near you, and how often you play/what in-app features you use. Basically, it's up to you! Below are some rough calculations, but we encourage you to calculate your own. This only accounts for geoming and associated bonuses, not bonus drops, referrals, surveys, Geoclaiming, or the many other ways to earn in this app. All numbers are USD.

It is worth noting that if you are driving around solely for the purposes of acquiring COIN, you are obviously haemorrhaging money on gas costs. Earning COIN only makes sense if you are driving somewhere you would already be driving. On the other hand, taking an extra walk or bike ride to earn coin is a great motivator and will be a boost to your mental and physical health.

Note that these numbers factor in the cost of the upgrades, which is why some of them may appear negative in the beginning or change the rate at which they appear to grow. Numbers are subject to change and vary from player to player, your mileage may vary. Please refer to official COIN app documentation for the most up to date numbers.

Background rewards - Normally you can only geomine while the COIN app is on the foreground of your phone. But, you can also earn coins “in the background” by giving the app permission to access your location full-time and enabling “background rewards” in the app settings. Note that your ability to background mine is limited and must be “recharged” by having the app in the foreground again.

Home Base Bonus - If you mine the same tile 3x in a row, you will see the home base bonus icon pop up on the left side of the app. This increases the bonus for any tiles mined within the “home base” area starting at 10% and going to 100%. You can move your home base as often as you want and your home base bonus lasts a set amount of time before you must once again re-mine the same tile 3x. You can increase your home base bonus with a BridgeX device.

HODL Rewards - The COIN App rewards you for several activities involving their XYO token and COINs. You can link a verified wallet (prove you hold XYO tokens) and earn .7% annual yield, hold COINs in your account for a 3.6% annual yield, and place your XYO tokens into the Uniswap liquidity pool for 1.5% annual yield on top of whatever Uniswap gives you (.3-1% depending on the pool you choose).

Geoclaiming - With Geoclaiming, you can spend COINs to earn a share of all the geomines that happen in your region. Depending on number of other players in your area and how many are also Geoclaiming, this can be quite worthwhile! You can Geoclaim multiple areas but you must physically go to those areas to make the claim. You can deposit 5 coin at a time to your claim, and you will be shown the percent of the claim you own. For example, let's say that a 100 COIN geomine occurs in your area, this means 10 coins will be sent to Geoclaim holders. If there are two Geoclaim holders (you and one other person) and you each contributed the same amount so you each have 50% stake in the claim, you would each get a 50% chance of getting the 10 coins. Note that the reward is not split between the owners, but rather your ownership stake determines your chances of getting the full reward. This is calculated for each geomining reward. Geoclaiming resets Sunday night in most of the US. Any mine for less than or equal to .09 coin does not result in any rewards being sent to Geoclaim owners as 10% of .09 is < .01 which is the minimum award. Users on pro plans do not have 10% of their reward sent to Geoclaim owners, instead, they keep the 10% and the 10% is paid to Geoclaim owners from the COIN app system.

Big Geomines - Big geomines occur randomly and award you significantly more coins than normal. Sometimes this means 50 coins other times it means 500 coins.

Team Lift - If you are on a paid plan and near another user on a paid plan, you both get a 10% bonus on any geomines. This bonus stacks as you add more paid users nearby up to 100% and importantly stacks in addition to whatever 12x etc multiplier your plan gets you. This feature can make this game a fun social excursion and helps undo some of the effect where many people mining the same tile otherwise reduces the rewards. You will see a team lift icon on your screen when this bonus is being applied.

Referral rewards - Of course, one of the best ways to increase your earnings in the app is to refer your friends! You get 10% of any coins they mine, so this can add up rather quickly. As a bonus, when they use your link, they get 1,000 coins to start. You are not given 10% of big geomines or geomines which are for less than .09 coin as 10% of .09 coin is less than .01 which is the minimum amount of reward that can be assigned. As a general rule of thumb, if you want to get as much from referral rewards as you currently do from mining, you will need to recruit 10 other users who mine as much as you do because you are only getting 10% of their output, though the real number will actually be slightly higher than this because of the excluded mining types mentioned earlier. Note that the referral link shown in your app will often change, but old links will continue to work.

Surveys and In-Store offers - There are a number of other ways to earn COIN in the game such as taking surveys and doing in-store visits or scanning barcodes. As with regular geomining, it is not worth driving out of your way to collect an in-store offer unless gas and other car ownership costs are free to you.

Before doing any paid upgrades, it is important that you research the pros and cons of each upgrade and figure out whether they make sense to pay for. Many people buy upgrades only to find out that the upgrades didn't do what they expected or that they would have made more money with a different upgrade (or no upgrade at all, though that is rarer).

There is a free google sheet/calculator that may help you figure out which combination of upgrades is worth purchasing.

The SentinelX is an item you can purchase which increases your geomining rewards in the game so long as it is powered on and within range of your phone. The reward increase is 12x, which is a reward amount you may recognize from the paid plans, but the reward does not stack. If you already have a paid plan, a SentinelX adds a 10% bonus on top of the 12x provided by the plan. Each SentinelX can only “belong” to one phone/account. One nice thing about the SentinelX is that it is a one time cost so you don't pay every month or worry that you aren't using the app enough to keep up with that month's subscription costs. While less powerful than the plans in some ways, I find this to be a potent benefit.

The SentinelX comes in two flavors: classic SentinelX and SentinelX NFC. You can use both if you want, but the rewards do not stack.

The classic SentinelX (SetinelX BLE) is a bluetooth-enabled keyfob similar to the Tile product. It has a replaceable battery and retails at $50 plus shipping on the Coin app website but you can find it cheaper on eBay for about $45 new including shipping. After a certain amount of time away from your phone it will turn off to save battery, so you press the button on it to turn it back on. It displays clearly in the app so you won't accidentally mine without it being on. Any phone within range of the SentinelX BLE will receive the 12x bonus, so you can mine with multiple devices at once.

The SentinelX NFC is a NFC-enabled device that looks like a credit card. If you've ever tapped your phone onto a register to pay for something, you've used NFC before. When mining with this device, you must tap it to your phone every few hours to keep it activated. Right now, the COIN App store is giving these devices away for free plus the cost of shipping ($12.95). Not all phones support NFC, so check whether your phone does before getting one of these.

If you have a SentinelX BLE or a SentinelX NFC, other users can use your SentinelX to get a 12x bonus on their geomines, and when they do so, 10% of the mined COIN goes to you. With the NFC, they must tap your card to their phone, which is a bit clunkier than just being in range. Also note that if the other user is on a premium plan, since they already receive the 12x as part of their plan, your SentinelX only gets them a 10% mining bonus.

If there are multiple SentinelX BLEs in range when a mine occurs, a SentinelX BLE will be chosen at random with equal likelihood of being picked, the owner of which will receive the 10% bonus. So if somebody mines near 10 SentinelXs and 7 of them are yours, you have a 70% chance of having one of yours picked and acquiring the 10% bonus.

If you are the owner of the SentinelX and the person who mines near it is a referral of yours, you get both the 10% of their mine from Sentinel Sharing and your 10% from your referral bonus.

Note that if mine reward is .09 or less, no 10% cut will be taken and no reward for the SentinelX's owner will be issued since 10% of .09 is less than .01 which is the smallest award that can be issued.

While some have proposed the exciting idea of leaving your SentinelX BLE in a crowded location, you should know that if SentinelX BLEs don't detect a COIN app user within range for a certain time period, they will turn off to save battery and be useless until somebody manually turns them back on. And that somebody would probably have to be you.

Here's what I don't know:

• If a premium user uses your SentinelX (and therefore only gets the 10% bonus), since you are getting 10% of their COINs from the mine, does the mean a net neutral mine for them?
• Can you use your SentinelX NFC on multiple phones at once (ie can get bonuses from multiple users at the same time or only one?)
• Does the 10% come off of the original mine amount or the mine amount + any multipliers the user has?

The BridgeX is a device that used to be sold by the COIN App that was based on a Raspberry Pi 3B and included in a geomining kit. Neither of these items are sold any longer, but they still work, and you can find some on eBay or from this site which lets you pay in crypto. You can use a single bridgex with multiple devices so long as they are within bluetooth range.

The BridgeX is useful for obtaining a better home base bonus. With the BridgeX, you get your home base bonus 5x faster and it lasts 5x longer. It enables enables Sentinel X BLE sharing if you don't have a paid subscription plan.

The COIN app developers also offer some paid plans to increase your in-game COIN earnings. Each plan offers slightly differing multiplier/bonus amounts. There is one final plan called the master plan that is invite-only for Android users but is publicly available in the Apple App Store, you can request Android access at the COIN app website. Pricing is not publicly available for the master plan. On the other end of the spectrum is the Lite plan, which is also invite only for Android but available for any Apple user in the Apple app store and comes in at $7.99/month with many of the benefits of Pro/Plus at a lower price.

Below are some of the terms I thought should be explained in more detail:

Geomining Speed - This is the speed at which you can geomine tiles. For example, if you are on a high-speed rail, you are probably skipping over lots of tiles and not geomining them because you are waiting for your geomining of the previous tile to complete. Note that this upgrade does you no benefit at all if you are mining the same tile repeatedly since the tile must take its own time to refresh.

Geomining Recharge Rate - The time you must wait in-between geomines. Note that this does help if you are trying to repeatedly mine the same time.

Geomining rewards vs Additional Geomining rewards - Yeah, I don't know what this means either. If you do and can point to a source, please let me know!

Geoclaim Shield - The geoclaim shield (Pro, Plus, and Master plans) prevents a geoclaim owner from taking 10% of all the mines you make which are under .09 coins. If you live in a city, this adds up to a little under 10% extra from your geomines as not all geomines are large enough to qualify. If you have the shield active, instead of you paying the 10%, the 10% is instead paid out by the system.

Geoclaim Bonus - Pro and master plan subscribers earn a bonus on their geoclaim earnings, which is 10% and 20% respectively. This bonus is paid out by the system and does not come from the geominers themselves. So, for example, somebody mines a 1 coin geomine in your geoclaimed area and you otherwise would have earned the reward from it, you would receive .01 (basic and lite plans), .02 (pro plan), and .03 coins (master plan)

Now that you've earned some COIN, let's talk about how to turn it into something useful. The most important question to ask is what the exchange rate is between the COIN in-app currency and whatever you are buying with it. For example, as of Jun 2021, 10,000 COINs can buy you 850 XYO tokens. Generally speaking, 10,000 COINs is roughly equivalent to $5.

Yes, I know this seems a little complicated, but you can do it. Think of it this way: You can spend 10 minutes learning this and you've automatically put yourself ahead of the many, many people who wouldn't cross that hurdle and you get paid for that extra work. Just like the people who never tried the COIN app in the first place, applied for a better job, or tried to find somebody to date because it seemed too complicated.

Like all sweepstakes, the odds are aligned against you and this is basically throwing your COIN away. They can be fun though! Occasionally, you may receive free entries as a “consolation prize” if you didn't enter a sweepstakes, these are worth using since they're free.

The physical items available in the COIN store vary, some of them you may find to be good deals, others not so much, you'll need to compare and contrast to see which is worth it for you.

By far the most popular way to redeem coins is for cryptocurrency. You must have 10,000 coins minimum to do this, but this does not mean that one cryptocurrency coin = 10,000 COINs, only that you must acquire 10,000 before you make a purchase. To a newbie, this may seem like a lot, but you can acquire this amount pretty quickly, especially if you have upgrades like a paid plan, a SentinelX, or a BridgeX.

The three cryptos currently offered are the XYO token (which can be used for payments on the XYO network when it is fully launched), Bitcoin (the one that started it all!), and Ethereum (the cryptocurrency/blockchain that XYO builds on top of). Which crypto to buy is a personal decision, there is no right or wrong answer. One benefit of buying the XYO token is that you earn HODL rewards for it in the app (if you use your own wallet) and you can buy it in smaller quantities, which enables you to cash out faster than other cryptocurrencies. Note that each time you cash out, you pay a transaction fee, so that means cashing out frequently will mean you pay more fees than cashing out the same amount over less individual transactions.

When you buy crypto, it will be sent to a crypto wallet of your choosing. From there, you can hold onto the crypto, spend it at any online retailer that accepts it, or sell it to convert it to your local “fiat” currency. There is a great conversion calculator here to check out.

Important note: having your own wallet is great (as it means that you and only you are in charge of the coins inside it) but it comes with some serious downsides. If you think it's unsafe to store all your money under a mattress, you probably won't want to store all your crypto in a wallet on your computer or your phone. For example, what happens when your computer dies and takes your wallet with it? Did you write down your recovery passphrase correctly? What if your computer gets a virus or you are victim of a phishing attack, scam, or a bitter ex or untrustworthy roommate who had access to your machine? What happens if somebody burglarizes your house or it catches on fire or there's a flood? These are all very real situations that can result in you losing your coins and they happen to people every day.

For the average person, exchanges are a much safer place to store larger amounts of crypto. An exchange is like a bank which offers full-time protection for your funds. It is important that you do some reading before you start transferring or saving crypto. The largest and most user-friendly crypto exchange by far in the US is Coinbase. Binance and Kraken are other popular options especially among more experienced traders. Coinbase is particularly nice because they offer a $5 sign-up bonus and “coinbase earn” which enables you to watch microvideos on various cryptocurrencies and earn a few bucks of them.

The simplest way to turn your COINs into USD (US dollars) is to:

1. Create a Coinbase account.
2. Once logged into Coinbase, go to Send/Receive and then Receive. Select “XYO” as your crypto to receive. It is crucial that you select XYO and copy the address it gives you. If you copy an address for a different crypto wallet type and send XYO to it, that XYO will be sent to a non-existent place and you will lose it forever!
3. In the COIN app, click your balance and choose to redeem for XYO tokens.
4. Copy the address provided by Coinbase into the COIN app when it asks for your XYO wallet address. Note that it may take several minutes for your transaction to process.
5. Once the transaction has processed, you can use the Buy/Sell section on Coinbase to turn it into USD by selling it
6. Once sold, go to Portfolio → USD and you can withdraw to your bank account

If you prefer to hold coins in your own wallet, Metamask is a popular wallet and instructions are provided by COIN App for how to use it. In order to earn HODL rewards in the COIN app, your XYO must be in a private wallet.

To turn your XYO into Ethereum or other coins/tokens, I suggest Uniswap since it's simple, decentralized, and hassle-free. Generally speaking, there is a slightly better exchange rate from COINs to XYO as opposed to COINs to Etherum or COINs to bitcoin, but the benefit is only there if you actually want XYO. If you buy XYO just to immediately convert it into other cryptos, fees mean it would make sense to cash out to those cryptos directly in the first place.

To cash out in Ethereum or Bitcoin, you will need an Ethereum or Bitcoin wallet. Metamask is a popular choice for Ethereum, with Exodus being the most popular for Bitcoin, but all major exchanges also support Ethereum and Bitcoin so you can have the Ethereum delivered directly to your exchange of choice without any fees caused by an XYO→Ethereum/Bitcoin conversion. Also remember that any time you move crypto between wallets (such as between your Metamask/Exodus wallet and an exchange), you will also incur fees there. So if you are looking to safely store your crypto on an exchange, it's cheapest to send it to the exchange directly in the first place. Because Ethereum generally has lower transaction fees, it is also generally slightly cheaper to convert COINs to than Bitcoin.

If you can't always have your phone out in your hand while you're commuting (such as riding a bike), there are a bunch of free screen lock apps that you can use. Here's a great one for android. These keep your screen on and your COIN app in the foreground, but in order to touch any buttons on the screen you have to correctly enter a PIN, press something five times, etc. This way you can throw your phone into your bag with COIN app running and not worry it's going to go texting nudes to your boss or buying expensive shoes on eBay.

Battery dying on you? You can buy a USB Battery Expansion Pack for about $10 that will give you enough battery to keep on going. For best battery health, never let your phone battery get below 20% or so, topping it up frequently is the best way to keep it in A++ shape.

Phone getting too warm while you're driving? Try a mount that goes over your A/C vent, that oughta solve it! Some cases are terrible at heat dissipation, so keep an eye on which case you use as well.

You are also encouraged to check out CoinWithUs which is a Reddit community of fellow COINers you can share guidance and tips and questions with.

Want another way to earn money using your devices? Check out Gridcoin, which gives you cryptocurrency when you donate your computers spare CPU cycles to scientific research projects.

Yes absolutely and the COIN app developers are fine with it! Each phone must use different accounts or the COIN app will think that you are cheating. Note that in many situations, there is little benefit to doing so. Mining rewards on the same tile, for example, will be split between your multiple devices if they all mine the same tile within a short period of time. That being said, some people like Uber drivers prefer to carry two phones: one for using maps/navigation and one for COIN app. You can find cheap used Android phones and tablets on eBay for around $20-$60 which is roughly the same price as a SentinelX. You can even save some money buying one with a broken camera, a crack/dent, or other imperfections. So long as it works for the COIN app, who cares?

Yes, COIN app will work on any relatively modern Android or iPhone with Bluetooth enabled and GPS capabilities, which is basically all of them.

No, you only need bluetooth if you want to connect to a SentinelX BLE. Not having bluetooth also means you won't get the bonus for geomining near somebody else's SentinelX.

No, you can use wifi alone if you want, though this will severely limit your ability to get out there and geomine. But if you are being tethered to another device, such as using your Android tablet to Geomine and then using your Android phone for your data connection, that is AOK.

Yes

At this point in time, it does absolutely nothing to help you earn COIN. This is part of a planned network upgrade that has been promised for years.

Bound witnesses are a feature of the XYO network. At this point in time, knowing how to make them does not make you any additional COIN in the COIN app, so you can safely ignore this terminology.

There's a few things I don't know that we'd like to include here. If you have an authoritative source to answer these questions, please email it to me at help at coinappwiki.com.

• What is “Geomining rewards” vs “Additional Geomining rewards” on the paid plans page of the COIN app site mean? Are these the same things?
• What exactly is the formula for shared rewards? Does your 10% bonus deduct from their rewards, or is a bonus in a true sense that they earn the same rewards while you get an extra 10%?
• If a premium user uses your SentinelX (and therefore only gets the 10% bonus), since you are getting 10% of their COINs from the mine, does the mean a net neutral mining for them?
• Can you use your SentinelX NFC on multiple phones at once (ie can get bonuses from multiple users at the same time or only one?)
• In shared rewards, does the 10% come off of the original mine amount or the mine amount + any multipliers the user has?
• If you refer somebody and get 10% of their geomines, is that 10% coming out of the base geomine value, or the value after any multipliers have been added on, for example, if they have a SentinelX?

Note that some outbound links from this wiki may result in this site receiving some revenue as it participates in some affiliate programs, but I promise that won't impact the impartiality or the usefulness of the advice you see here! None of these links cost you any money.